Identification products, such as smart cards and RFID tags, are widely used in fields such as transport (ticketing, road tolling, baggage tagging), finance (debit and credit cards, electronic purse, merchant card), communications (SIM card for GSM phone), and tracking (access control, inventory management, asset tracking). RFID is an acronym of radio frequency identification. International standard ISO14443A is the industry standard for contactless smart cards. ISO14443A-compliant products such as MIFARE provide RF communication technology for transmitting data between a card or tag and a reader device. For example, in electronic ticketing for public transport, travelers wave their card over a reader at the turnstiles or entry point, benefiting from improved convenience and speed in the ticketing process. Such products are said to be the key to individual mobility in the future, supporting multiple applications including road tolling, airline tickets, access control and many more.
Evolving from a combination of contactless identification and networking technologies, near field communication (NFC) is a very short-range wireless technology, for distances measured in centimeters. NFC has been described on the website http://www.nxp.com/nfc and in the standard ISO/IEC 18092. NFC technology is optimized for intuitive, easy and secure communication between various devices without the need for manual configuration by a user. In order to make two devices communicate, users bring them close together or make them touch. The devices comprise NFC interfaces that will automatically connect and configure themselves to form a peer-to-peer network. NFC can also bootstrap other protocols like Bluetooth or wireless Ethernet (Wi-Fi) by exchanging configuration and session data. NFC is compatible with contactless smart card platforms. This enables NFC devices to read information from these cards, making contactless smart cards the ideal solution for bringing information and vouchers into the NFC world. NFC devices can also operate like a contactless card or tag, which makes them compatible with the existing infrastructure of ISO14443A-compliant systems.
The NFC Forum (http://www.nfc-forum.org/) is a non-profit industry association which promotes the use of NFC short-range wireless interaction in the fields of consumer electronics, mobile devices and personal computers. The NFC Forum promotes the implementation and standardization of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.
A typical example of an NFC Forum use case is the so-called Smart Poster application. A poster or billboard may be equipped with a tag which can be touched, for example, with a mobile device, such as a mobile phone, in order to read out application data stored on the tag. The application data stored on the tag may, for example, comprise the address of the website of a concert advertized by the smart poster. In this case the mobile device may open a browser window and connect to the internet to access the website. In addition, the application data may comprise a digital signature which allows the mobile device to check the authenticity and integrity of the data.
In the terminology of the NFC Forum the tag is referred to as a NFC Forum Tag and the mobile device is referred to as a NFC Forum Device. More information about the NFC Forum Tag and the NFC Forum device can be found in the following documents, which are accessible via http://www.nfc-forum.org:                NFC Forum Type Tags, White Paper V1.0, NXP Semiconductors, published on 1 Apr. 2009        Smart Poster Record Type Definition, Technical Specification, NFC Forum, SPR 1.1, Jul. 24, 2006        Signature Record Type Definition, Candidate Technical Specification, NFC Forum, NFCForum-TS-Signature_RTD-1.0_draft—14        Text Record Type Definition, Technical Specification, NFC Forum, RTD-Text 1.0, Jul. 24, 2006        URI Record Type Definition, Technical Specification, NFC Forum, RTD-URI 1.0, Jul. 24, 2006        
The use of digital signatures on NFC tags in order to ensure authenticity and integrity of data has been discussed in the paper “Digital Signatures on NFC Tags”, a Master of Science Thesis from Markus Kiås, School of Information and Communication Technology from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, published on 18 Mar. 2009 and accessible via http://www.kth.se/. In particular, this paper evaluates the feasibility of digital signatures on NFC tags.
US 2010/161410 (A1), entitled “Smart Poster” and published on 24 Jun. 2010, discloses that content downloadable from a smart poster is managed remotely at a server. The content data is monitored and usage data of the smart poster is analyzed at the server via an NFC-enabled telecommunications device that is mounted behind a touch point of the smart poster. For this purpose a processor is provided which is arranged to communicate details of transactions between the NFC-enabled telecommunications device and a mobile device to the remote server via a network. The logging of transactions between the smart poster and the mobile device allows the usage of the smart poster to be monitored, in that, for example, the server may be arranged to interrogate the processor and to generate an alarm signal if a response other than the expected response is received. In this way tampering with the NFC-enabled device can be detected. However, there still exists a need to improve the security of use of smart poster applications of the kind set forth.